John Traherne Moggridge

“ It seems strange that while travellers have reported the seed-storing habits of ants in far distant countries, our naturalists at home should have not only remained unaware of its existence in Europe, but even strenuously denied it. It is certain, however, that naturalists and others in southern Europe are more or less aware of the fact, but I have been unable to learn that any accurate account of the habits of harvesting ants has hitherto been published, or that any one has taken pains to discover what becomes of the seed so laboriously obtained. ”

“ Indeed, throughout the whole of their captivity they seemed to be perfectly contented with their lot and free from disease, remarkably few ants dying or appearing feeble, and as far as the limited space would permit they reproduced most of the habits which I had noted as belonging to them in a wild state, such as the formation of a rubbish heap; bringing out refuse materials, gnawed and empty seed-coats, the ends of radicles, and root fibres which had penetrated their nest, and laying sprouted seeds in the air to dry after having gnawed off the radicle in order to arrest their growth. ”

“ But, as it is, the work of opening the door, snatching in an ant, and closing it again, is but the affair of a second or two, and before the companions of the victim have time to realize the nature of the phenomenon, the gaping earth has closed again and become once more, to all appearance, part of the solid and trustworthy ground. ”

“ Though structor and barbara make seed collecting the business of their lives, they will, at least in times of scarcity, eagerly devour animal food if it happen to fall in their way, and in the harvesting trains a few ants may occasionally be seen carrying small dead insects and the like. Once I threw a dead grasshopper down close to a nest of barbara; it was immediately seized upon, and—after strenuous efforts had been made to dismember it above ground, some ants straining back the legs and wings, while others rushed in to gnaw at the muscles where the tension was greatest,—carried down below. ”

“ In April, 1873, the surface door of a wafer-nest together with a very small portion of the tube was brought to me from the summit of the Aiguille mountain, near Mentone. I was greatly surprised to learn that a trap-door spider could live in such a situation, for the earth on that plateau, which has an elevation of 4032 feet above the sea, is always frozen hard for weeks and even months together during the winter, and snow frequently lingers there. The spider, therefore, which endures these conditions is scarcely likely to be of the same species as any one of those inhabiting the lower country. ”

“ I greatly envy those who are able to travel, and who have it in their power to investigate the habits of these creatures at several widely separated points; for there seems every probability that other new types of nest remain to be detected in warm climates, some of which may perhaps exceed those we have been here studying in beauty of workmanship and adaptation; it is at least certain that an abundant harvest of interesting facts in the life history of trap-door spiders remains yet to be gathered in. ”

“ I knew that birds would eat the male and female ants, but I had thought the workers were exempt from their attacks, and, indeed, they must be so as a rule, for otherwise they would speedily become extinct. ”

“ That so young and weak a creature should be able to excavate a tube in the earth many times its own length, and know how to make a perfect miniature of the nest of its parents, seems to be a fact which has scarcely a parallel in nature. ”

“ At Mentone two distinct spiders construct nests of the cork type, one of these being a Nemesia and the other a Cteniza. They are as unlike each other as they well can be, and it seems remarkably strange that their nest-building instinct should be so similar. The nest of the Cteniza is indeed shallower than that of the Nemesia, and a practised eye can usually trace a difference between the slightly less angular lower surface and more semi-circular outline of the door of the former, and the more abruptly bevelled and more circular door of the latter. ”

“ Besides this, at intervals, combats might be seen taking place, one ant seizing the free end of a seed carried by another, and endeavouring to wrench it away, and then frequently, as neither would let go, the stronger ant would drag seed and opponent towards its nest. At times other ants would interfere and seize one of the combatants and endeavour to drag it away, this often resulting in terrible mutilations, and especially in the loss of the abdomen, which would be torn off while the jaws of the victim retained their indomitable bull-dog grip upon the seed. ”

“ But, in the case of spiders inhabiting true trap-door nests, this is not so; they begin life immediately on leaving the parent nest by making homes for themselves near at hand which they will not desert, and there is no likelihood of their being accidentally carried from place to place unless occasionally by running water. Thus it happens that whenever we find the same trap-door spider at two distant localities, we may feel tolerably sure that the species has travelled from one to the other by gradual extension, and that, either now or in times past, it occupied all the intervening country. ”

“ More frequently, when the spider finds that resistance is hopeless and sees the earth crumbling in, she drops to the bottom of her nest and lies there helpless, with her legs folded against her body like an embryonic creature; some, however, more savage than their neighbours, fly out and strike at the intruder with their fangs. ”

“ The rarity or complete absence of the wings of insects which habitually fly rather than crawl on the ground, and my inability to discover either snares or any evidence that these spiders ever leave the nest, lead me to believe that they live (at any rate from October to May) by dragging into their nests any insects which approach within reach.
Ants, earwigs, beetles, and wood-lice are precisely the very creatures which would fall a prey to the [ 239 ] spider without obliging her to leave her nest, and it is accordingly their remains that we find. ”

“ But if you take it away entirely, she turns down the edges to close the aperture as best she can, and that she does hurriedly, without waiting for night. The light seems to offend her so much that, if exposed to the full day, she remains so stupefied as to appear dead, nor does she move even if shaken; on the contrary, she constantly stops still and holds herself with her feet pressed against her body. ”

“ For example, the lizards will lie in wait for and greedily seize and devour the winged males and females of structor and barbara, though they dare not attack the assembled workers. It is curious to watch the way in which these worker ants will protect the winged ants which are about to leave the nest, by gathering round and swarming over them. When, as often happens, the nest is placed in an old terrace-wall, one may see the lizards creeping along or lying moulded into the inequalities of the stones, all having their eager eyes directed towards the swarm. ”

“ The cork nests are the simplest form of nest, with the exception of those described above from Jamaica, and have constituted, up to the present time, the only type known in Europe. Their chief claims to our admiration lie in the perfection of workmanship which the doors usually exhibit, and the marvellous concealment which they afford when closed. These doors as a rule fit so tightly [thanks to the accurate adjustment of their sloping sides to the bevelled lip of the tube which receives them,] that they afford a certain amount of mechanical resistance, even when the spider is away. ”

“ Some construct no nest at all or only an irregular web, and live under stones; others, like Theraphosa Blondii, make a simple cylindrical tunnel, or, like those just described, a tube having a prolonged, uncovered, funnel-shaped mouth: others again, belonging to the genus Atypus, form the curious and as yet imperfectly-understood nests with a silken tubular lining, part of which hangs down outside; while on the highest rung of the architectural ladder, stand the builders of the veritable trap-door nests. ”

“ I have seen the remains of ants at the bottom of the tube of trap-door spider nests, and watched a hunting spider, Lycosa, capture a large black ant (Formica pubescens) , by entangling it in threads, which it deftly spun about its limbs, while running rapidly round the struggling victim in a circle, and dodging out of the way of the ant's mandibles. In England one may frequently see ants caught in the spiders' webs among the rose-bushes, and Mr. Blackwall says, in his Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland, that Theridion riparium lives principally on ants. ”

“ When we remember that there are minute hymenopterous insects which lay their eggs within the eggs of the spiders, we can see how important it may be that the entrance to a nest, which is at once nursery and stronghold, should be closed by a well-fitting door, and one which may exclude, not only the larger and more powerful enemies of the full-grown spiders, but also the tiny and almost imperceptible assailants of the eggs and young. ”

“ Lady Parker has also told me of some black trap-door spiders which were so common about Paramatta, near Sydney, in Australia, that scarcely any one paid attention to them, and which might habitually be seen out on the garden paths in the daytime near their holes, to which they would run in all haste when alarmed. The eye of the passer-by was attracted by the open doors, which were about the size of a sixpence, and fall over backwards when the spider makes her exit, but when closed, on her return, they fit so neatly that it is extremely difficult to detect them. ”

“ In my concluding remarks in Ants and Spiders I called attention to the importance which attaches to a knowledge of the food and manner of feeding of any creature whose life-history we may wish to study, and I would now once more press the subject on the attention of my readers. For the range and distribution of a species largely depends upon the nature of its food, and this will also be an indication of the rivals with which it has to compete in [ 237 ] the struggle for existence ”

“ We have learned in the first place that the ancients had facts on their side when they said that the ant is one of the very few creatures which lays up supplies of food sufficient to last for months, or even perhaps, as Bochart says, for a whole year; and though we cannot quite accept the statement that "there is no animal except men, mice, and ants, that stores its food," [36] they were right in saying that the habit is a most singular and interesting one. ”

“ One may then see the worker ants walk with impunity straight [ 163 ] up to the very noses of the lizards, while the male or female which should chance to straggle in the same direction would infallibly be eaten up. The lizards plainly show their fear of the workers by the way in which, when they make up their mind to try a dash at some outlying part of the ant colony, they leap through the lines in the utmost haste as if traversing a ring of fire. ”

“ I have diligently turned over piles of stone, greatly to the annoyance of many little scorpions, but have never secured, or even seen, another male spider. This is the more to be regretted as the species of trap-door spider are much better characterized in the male than in the female sex, the bulb-like enlargement which is found at the end of the palpi in the former taking on a great variety of forms, each of which is distinctive. ”

“ It seems likely that, if other harvesting ants do exist in Europe they may belong to one of these six species; for we have seen (Ants and Spiders, p. 59) that all the ants which are known to possess this habit are either members of the genus Atta or belong to genera closely related to it.
In the case of Pheidole megacephala (the only other European ant which I have detected collecting seeds in large numbers) , I have never been able to find granaries or subterranean stores of any kind, though I have frequently made extensive search for them, and explored, to all appearance, the whole nest. ”

“ As I was aware this fact militated against the observations of entomologists in Europe, I was careful not to deceive myself by confounding the seeds of a Panicum with the pupæ of the insect. Each ant was charged with a single seed, but as it was too weighty for many of them, and as the strongest had some difficulty in scaling the perpendicular sides of the cylindrical hole leading to the nest below, many were the falls of the weaker ants with their burdens from near the summit to the bottom. ”